Daughter of Fire- Conspiracy of the Dark Read online

  Panwel twirled his index finger in a tight circle, and the coin began to spin in place with the same speed. While the mage worked his magic, his hands glowed with a yellow light so pale and translucent it was almost invisible. Had the night not been so dark, the magic would have been impossible to see at all. It spread out from him like the gentle flame of a dim candle and traced a thin thread to the coin. The crowd of children whistled their approval and clapped wildly. Panwel snapped his fingers and the coin burst into bright yellow flames before disappearing completely. The children’s mouths fell open and they gaped at where the coin had been. Panwel winked at them and clapped his hands once. Immediately, small red flowers fell from the dark night sky all around the fire.

  Children and adults alike put out their hands in awe and caught the flowers, which collected in their cupped hands like tiny piles of snow. When I brought the flowers to my nose, they smelled as though they had recently been plucked. I had never seen flowers so red. I guessed they must have been a type of flower found wherever the mage was from, whether that was Hargesa or, as Firdas had claimed, not.

  Panwel performed trick after trick for his audience, such as creating animals out of snow that he made walk around and dance. I watched his every move like a hawk watches a mouse in the snow, barely able to breathe. His magic was like an impossible, limitless dream. I remembered the words of two rough, grizzled soldiers sitting at that same fire discussing magic the summer before.

  “The thing about magic is…you never know what you’ll get,” said the first. “Can you imagine only having an affinity for laundry?”

  “Aye, but imagine if you had an affinity for metal! You’d never want for work,” said the other.

  An “affinity,” we had long ago been told, was a person’s particular magical specialty. Some mages could work fire, others water, others wind and so on. I didn’t know Panwel’s affinity, but I had a suspicion: illusion. The red flowers disappeared moments after filling our hands, and the snow creatures blew away with the wind. If Firdas was right, I realized, and Panwel was going into the North, this affinity might be the only thing that would keep him safe. If he wanted to, he could become invisible. He could look like a tree or a deer. The Northmen wouldn’t be able to find him.

  Right before he finished Panwel looked at me, reached into his heavy fur coat, and pulled out a flower no longer than his finger. The green stem was long and graceful, the flower delicate and white as snow. He gently passed it to me. This was no illusion. The peals were soft beneath my fingertips.

  “The Nix Flos,” he murmured softly, for my ears alone. “The snow flower. It belongs to the Ice Crown, like you. Keep it. It will bring you luck.”

  I clutched the flower tightly to my breast in trembling fingers, too awed to even thank him for the gift. Panwel gave a half-bow to his audience, then made a show of yawning and stretching and retreated back into Ma Ren’s house to get a few hours’ sleep before rising with the dawn to disappear among the trees. If he crossed the border and returned we never knew— because he never came to Thamir again. I kept the white flower ever after and thought of him often over the next few months. Wherever he had gone, and whatever he had done, I hoped that he was safe.

  Panwel’s magic was like the first whisper of spring after a long, cold winter: a promise of lightness and hope. As I lay restless on the floor that night, my mind raced, trying to remember everything that we had been told over the years about magic. The ability to work magic was rare, and magic was often capricious and hard to control. Nor did everyone who had magic become a mage. Being a mage required both enough magic and the training to use it properly. To become a certified mage, one had to attend one of the two mage universities in King’s City: Windhall University or Graymere College. Gaining admission into either of them was both difficult and expensive. The schools counted on the fact that certified mages could expect to make good wages in a provincial capital after graduation and so demanded high tuition.

  Mages were classified based on their power and ability. The best and most powerful mages might eventually become Great Mages, who sat at the apex of the mage hierarchy. From their ranks were drawn the King’s Mages, who were hand selected by the King to serve in the King’s Regiment, an elite fighting unit comprised of Great Mages and fierce non-mage soldiers. In the entire kingdom, there were at most thirty King’s Mages. The whole of the Ice Crown was unlikely to ever see another King’s Mage for a hundred years at least. I had truly experienced a miracle.

  The next day, while the village children were still abuzz with retelling each other the tricks Panwel had performed, I told my brothers that I wanted to be a mage. I didn’t have to be a Great Mage, any mage type would do .My face was flushed with hope and excitement. I loved my life in Thamir and wouldn’t have traded it for anything, but the idea of magic was thrilling. It was addictive. I wanted more.

  “Brave heart,” Kem said sympathetically, patting me on the head. “Thamir’s never had a mage.”

  “But we could!”

  “Two hundred years is a long time,” Kyan said. “What’s wrong with being a trapper? Not good enough for you anymore?”

  “No, it’s not that,” I protested.

  “Don’t go getting your heart set on it,” Kem warned solemnly. “You’ll only end up breaking it. Ice Crowners aren’t meant to do magic. Too much ice in our veins, maybe. It freezes the magic.”

  I spent the next few weeks screwing up my face in a pained expression of concentration, trying to summon magic. I would sneak up behind my mother, Wren, and wiggle my fingers at her, willing her to turn into a rabbit. I tried to change the color of our lanky wolfhound Wolf’s fur from gray to brown, but he only cocked his head at me and watched with his light brown eyes, his fur still gray. I tried calling clouds and melting snow, but nothing happened. There probably was a deep and abiding lesson to be learned from my experience about how determination and desire aren’t always enough to overcome obstacles, but I was too young to learn it. I believed if I wanted something badly enough, I could have it.

  The only thing that saved me from a deep and lasting bitterness about my lack of magical ability was that being a child, my passions shifted quickly. A month later, my dreams of being a mage had dimmed and were supplanted by my joy at my new bow and the long knife my father gifted me for my twelfth birthday. I thought no more of the impossible future I couldn’t have, and instead focused on the present I did have. Indeed, I might have abandoned entirely my childish dreams of becoming a mage, even if I still saw Panwel making red flowers rain from the sky in my dreams, but fate relishes the unexpected. On my fifteenth birthday, I discovered I had magic.

  Chapter 2

  “Society would not exist without hierarchy. With no king, there is only chaos.”

  —Hadriel IV, sixth king of the Lamid dynasty

  “Mages? Mages bring nothing but trouble.”

  —Eddick, Lord Chancellor

  There is a difference between watching someone pull back the string of a bow and pulling it yourself, feeling the rough hide dig deeply into your own fingers, your muscles trembling as they fight stiff, unyielding wood. A difference between watching the wind shake branches of a tree from the safety of shelter and feeling the wind batter and howl against you, tearing at your hair and slapping your cheeks until you’re breathless. Before the first bolt of magic streaked from me—fiery, untamed, and brilliant blue—I had thought I understood what magic was and how it worked…all because of the stories of a few soldiers. I had thought magic was some sort of element that existed in the world like air or dirt or water, invisible as the wind. I thought mages accessed this magic the way I put a cup or a bucket into a stream to get water.

  I was wrong.

  If magic came from outside the body, a mage could have easily picked it up and set it aside at any time, like a favorite garment or a sewing needle. A mage could choose to never use magic at all and live their life no different from their friends and family. Everything about magic would have been a choice. But magic was like blood, not water. It wasn’t a choice, and there was no setting it aside. It was something that came from inside each mage. What’s more, it demanded use, release. It roared, screamed, bellowed to be unleashed.

  In the absence of someone in Thamir who had seen magic’s fingerprints, who knew the signs of its manifestation and could identify its growth within me, I thought I must be dying. For months before my fifteenth birthday, fierce, ravenous fever ravaged my body. At night, I tossed and turned, burning like an untamed forest fire. During the day, I was restless and unable to sit still. I stalked through the woods alone, sometimes running ceaselessly until the heavy exhaustion in my legs numbed the flames that gnawed my limbs like a hungry wolf. My family did whatever they could to ease my suffering, but they were helpless and fearful that I would become one more headstone in the forest.

  I thought the fire must surely be a disease that would slowly sap my energy until there was nothing left. I would become a husk, too weak to walk or eat, destroyed from the inside out. When fever twisted and distorted my world, I told my mother it felt as though something inside me was struggling to escape but couldn’t find the way out.

  On my fifteenth birthday exactly, as the sun began to rise, the magic at last broke through. I was standing by the hearth, alone in the house. I was swaying slightly, almost too weak to support myself after being sick for so long, when my palms began to burn as though I carried two burning embers in them. I cried out as my arms clenched in spasm, and immediately bolts of bright blue fire flashed out from my hands, hitting the wall beside the hearth and singeing two black holes into the logs. A pile of wooden bowls that had been carefully stacked beside the hearth fell over, clattering loudly. My mother, who had stepped outside to bring in wood for the cooking fire, heard the sound and rushed in.

  “What—” she began to ask, her eyes concerned as they fell upon me.

  “Stay back!” I yelled.

  Instinctively, I raised a hand to keep her away, but when I felt the heat building within it, I dropped it immediately. The blue bolt that sprang from my palm splattered against the ground in an explosion of sparks.

  My mother froze in the doorway, uncertain, an expression of shock on her face. “What is it? What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know!”

  The heat began building in my hands again, and I looked for water in which to douse them. Could water cool this strange blue fire? There was no water, however, and I was out of time. The bolts flashed out again, hitting the wall with a sharp crack. I pressed my palms together, hoping that the fire would somehow be trapped there. I stuttered, “I need…I need to get outside.”

  Wordlessly, my mother stepped to the side and I fled past her, my hands still pressed together so tightly that my arms shook. My teeth were clenched against the pain of the burning, which, frustrated at being unable to find release through my hands, was now running up my arms like liquid fire. The pain was agonizing. I ran through the village mindlessly, my bare feet slapping the cold earth and my clothing flying around me like startled birds. I reached the surrounding trees and crashed onward through the forest, a voice in my mind screaming, “Away! Away! Away!”

  After what could have been minutes or an hour, the fire was so hot within me that I could go no further. I collapsed in a pile under a pine tree. Sweat ran freely from my limp black hair into my eyes, making them sting, and down my back. I was too tired to hold my hands together anymore. I pushed them out in front of me and immediately the magic burst forth like the opening salvo of a summer thunderstorm. Blue fire rocketed away from me, hissing and sizzling as it shot into and past the trees. When a bolt struck, it sparked and burned, sending up a small plume of black smoke. Heat burned all the way up to my shoulders, making my eyes water with pain.

  The barrage of blue bolts was pulling strength from me, the way a fire sucks the liquid from meat left too long over a low flame. With every discharge, it became harder to catch my breath, and my arms became heavier. I tried to force myself to keep my hands up and away from myself, but the bolts were hitting lower, sometimes plowing into the ground and scorching a black line through the pine needles that carpeted the forest floor. I worried what would happen if I inadvertently allowed my palms to face a leg or some other part of me. Surely I would be burned. At the same time, I was glad to note that for every bolt that left me, the burning feeling in my arms decreased. Eventually, I reasoned, if I could only hold on long enough, this frenzy would wear itself out.

  Long minutes stretched into what felt like days. The bolts began to come more sporadically, like an unpredictable cough, spluttering and bursting prematurely in the air. I knew when the last bolt left because the fire that had seared my limbs for months was at last gone completely. There was nothing left, only coldness and a weariness that penetrated from my skin to my bones. I curled myself into a tight ball, hugging my knees to my chest, and fell asleep.

  When I woke, barely an hour had passed. Although my sweat-drenched hair had dried while I slept, I was still barefoot and not dressed to be out. The fire had returned to my hands, which was the only thing that kept me from shivering in the cool air. At the moment, it was like a warm hearth fire that radiates gentle heat rather than a raging bonfire, for which I was grateful. I didn’t think the uncontrollable bolts of blue would return any time soon, but I had no way of telling when they would.

  I picked myself up off the ground with great effort and looked down at myself. I might as well have rolled all over the forest floor. I was festooned with twigs and leaves, and my feet had turned brown from the dirt I had recklessly run over in my flight from the village. But things could have been far worse; I was unhurt, and I had not hurt my mother or caused our house to be destroyed.

  I began to walk toward the small brook not far from the village. I was lucky that it hadn’t frozen over yet; in a month more, it would be ice. When I reached it, I fell to my knees and cupped large mouthfuls of water to my lips. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was until the first drop hit my tongue. When I had drunk enough, I washed the dried, salty sweat from my face, scrubbing my fingertips vigorously against my skin.

  My reflection looked back at me from the rippling water with tired, dark eyes red rimmed and framed by purple circles. My narrow face, with its sharp angles and high cheekbones, looked even thinner than usual. My skin, the pale white of an Ice Crowner, was tinged almost blue, my lips bloodless. I winced and slapped at my cheeks to bring blood to them, but the slaps were feeble and my arms sluggish to respond. I sat back, crossing my legs and wiping my hands on my trousers.

  My mind churned slowly. Understanding came slowly through the fog of exhaustion. There was only one explanation for what had happened: I had magic. The soldiers had said that magic came on a person’s fifteenth birthday, and what else could it be? I marveled at my hands, now alien to me. The fire seemed to burn more hotly for just a moment, as though responding to my thoughts. A laugh burst forth unexpectedly from my chest. In that instant, I was an eleven-year-old child again, telling Kyan and Kem that I would be a mage. I looked into the brook and the child looked back at me, smiling triumphantly. She had succeeded.

  In the weeks that followed, I discovered magic was an untamed horse and I was its rider. No bit, no reins, no saddle, just the feel of my fingers clutching desperately to a gritty mane as I struggled not to be thrown. Sometimes I could summon the magic, but most often it flashed out on its own with little warning, disobedient and reckless as a small child. At those times, it was all I could do to try to point my hands at the ground to avoid hitting someone or breaking something. I didn’t think that a stray bolt of my magic had the power to kill, but certainly it would leave a burn mark where it struck, and more than one villager had to yelp and duck for cover around me.

  I was frustrated and sometimes afraid of the wild, rebellious magic. I hated that I lost control more often than I won. In my childhood fantasies, I had never really believed magic would be difficult to master, even though I had been told so. It had seemed an easy thing to have magic: all benefits and no downsides. The reality was different, and it took all and more of my strength and concentration to control even what I could.

  And yet for all my family and the other villagers saw me struggle, they were proud beyond measure. I was Thamir’s first mage. It was too soon to know what my affinity might be, they murmured to each other, other than the pesky blue lightning bolts, but perhaps I would be able to control the weather or animals. I should go to the provincial capital, Namoreth, and work there, they agreed. They didn’t know what sort of job a forest-bred girl with magic might find, but in their eyes danced the luxuries described to them by the soldiers: soft cotton sheets, shimmering dresses, succulent fruits, and more. Ice Crowners may have loved the land of their birth, but they were a people of vast imagination. My parents couldn’t afford to send me to a mage school, so I would never be a mage, but surely there was a bright future in Namoreth for a girl with magic.

  The intoxicating, delicious delight of knowing I had magic gave me the confidence to have dreams of my own. I didn’t want to leave the Ice Crown forever, but I was determined to learn how to control magic the way Panwel had that night four years ago. What was wild now would not always be. I was like a flower on the cusp of blooming—and who knew what beauty lay inside? I was not grandiose in my ambitions; I did not dream of being a Great Mage. I did believe, however, that I could become an uncertified mage if I could only find someone willing to teach me. The soldiers had said there were mages willing to teach outside the university system. I should be able to find one in Namoreth. I wouldn’t be officially recognized as a mage, but I would learn to control my magic. With so many kinds of magic in the world, surely my affinity would be something interesting and useful that could help me in the Ice Crown. I would see the marvelous, exotic world that the soldiers had told us about, and then when it was time, I would come back home.